124 KNOWING DICKENS
The masculine force of John Harmon only emerges when he becomes an
unnamed “man,” dressed up in George Radfoot’s coat and carrying Radfoot’s
knife to scare Riderhood until he signs a retraction of his accusation that
Gaffer Hexam was John Harmon’s murderer. After this burst of aggressive
manhood, he returns to his impersonation as Secretary and agent of another,
re-choosing a death-in-life that is comparable to Bradley Headstone’s school-
master self. The difference is that Harmon-Rokesmith gets to cast himself
in both parts and to control the staging. So the two Dickens figures split
between them the controlled impersonation of acting “another man” and the
uncontrollable self-destruction of a man relentlessly drawn toward an inner
underworld he has labored all his life to escape.
Dickens’s plan for the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood brought the
theme of murderous rivalry to its highest focus. As Forster summarized it,
Drood was to be the story “of the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the
originality of which was to consist in the review of the murderer’s career
by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if,
not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted. The last chap-
ters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all
elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him” (Forster
808). The plan brings Dickens’s journalistic interest in the cool demeanor
of guilty murderers together with his personal interest in the dissociated
self. Stimulated by opium, John Jasper alternates between different states of
being that allow him to discuss himself as if he were somebody else. At the
same time the bonds of male rivalry are tightened by the blood connection
between uncle and nephew—a connection that allows Jasper to act out a
passionate and loving identification with his victim Edwin Drood while he
toys with Drood’s fiancée Rosa Bud. The difference in generation suggests
a move into new personal territory: the older man’s envious attachment to
the young. Even in its unfinished form the novel reveals the intensity of its
concentration by producing, chapter after chapter, instances of triangulated
desire among its array of characters. In Drood Dickens used elements of the
sensation novel he had learned from Wilkie Collins, but his primary quarry
lay in his long, richly elaborated obsession with “another man.”
It might be argued of Our Mutual Friend, as it has been argued of David
Copperfield, that its emotionally compelling male friendships and rivalries are
succeeded in the plot by conventionally heterosexual marriages. I would sug-
gest that in Dickens’s imagination the internal energies stirred up by desire
for an elusive object are redirected as identification and aggression aimed at
other men. The erotic charge of fascination is not so much an indicator of
sexual attraction or repulsion as it is a kind of internal shift in the fantasy of